I am trying to upgrade a laptop with an oem mce 2004 system. I have an older version xp pro upgrade disk and when I try it, I get a message that the installed version is newer than the one I am trying to install. I slipstreamed sp3 into the disk and now it is willing to make the upgrade, but then says my cd key is not valid. FYI concerns about piracy: The xppro disk was on a P3 that I salvaged for parts. It will be on only 1 machine. PS: When I start a clean install with the original disk it does accept the key that came with it. I also tried all the keys in the pid.inf and the unattend.txt files.

Hi, About the Operating System issue, please get the support by posting the issue on the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/default.mspx Thanks Allen

As an experiment I installed an old version of xp home on a clean hd and tried upgrading with my slipstreamed disk. It worked fine, so the trouble must be with mce 2004 ??? Perhaps it is not a viable upgrade path. I have done as Allen suggested above and will look for further posts at that location. Thank you Allen